A human has five senses – it’s a fact. Everything in the world is given to us by sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. And the most interesting thing without them there would be nothing. Yes, exactly emptiness – I can recommend you watch a film “Perfect Sense”, where lack of senses is demonstrated rather impressively. The exceptional importance of senses we should be understood as obvious.

Of course, we naturally pay more attention the some of them (according to statistic, we receive 80-90% of information through vision) and we should reckon with this fact. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean we should ignore less used organs, how some marketers do: they think it would be enough to give a performance for eyes and, at the best, for ears. Then such specialists are surprised by the failure of their advertising campaigns.

It’s fair enough to mention web space (and, in most cases, reality as well, by the way) doesn’t allow to influence some of the senses directly, so a competent web marketer should concentrate on metaphors. An advertisement must include appealing to taste, smell and touch by means of approachable sight and hearing. Below I’d like to share few sensory web marketing tips with examples.

Are you a shopaholic unable to strip yourself of occasional shopping jags serving a kind of relaxation or sublimation for your overdriven mind? Or you are a sober customer accomplishing only well-considered purchases… The third variant is a shopping hater, absolutely intolerant to regular stores and striving to avoid them when possible, or at least minimize the time spent there.

You know, it seems like we’ve got great news for all shoppers regardless of their habits. Have you ever heard about recent click and collect retailing trend? (JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2013 – slide 21). Maybe you have even checked some of its pleasures? The best thing about the service is that it is beneficial both for merchants and their customers.

But let’s figure out why this revolutionary method balancing on the edge of digital and physical world is getting more popularity around the US and Europe.

First of all, click and collect offers the convenience of online shopping, but lets you get rid of its main drawback on the last stage on delivery. According to the report, 60% of online shoppers had issues with the delivery last year. Actually, the system allows choosing items online and then you are free to decide when to pick them up locally. All selected stuff is waiting for you, packed at the nearest collection point. All you need to do is to give the code, which was sent by email, to the service worker. No more ruined plans and endless hours of waiting for delivery, you can get the product in time and save on courier fee.

Another advantage of click & collect is that you can easily return the product you don’t like. The scheme becomes shorter and quicker: just click – collect – try on – and bring back if it doesn’t fit.

By the way, online-only stores like House of Fraser, Boden, Oasis, Asos, Amazon, eBay and many others turned to be really innovative for the sake of customers’ convenience. They involved third parties such as corner shops, newsagents and filling stations into Collect+ system, which means that you can pick up your order in any signed up location.

Of course, while the technology is young enough, certain imperfections still spoil general impression a bit. Among common clumsy moments are queues and next day product availability. However, Amazon is a step forward of its competitors due to the lockers being installed in shopping centers and supermarkets. They improve the situation somehow as the buyers simply input the code, sent to their email and take the package in minutes.

If you liked this idea of further e-Commerce perfection and want to join this futuristic trend, let’s generate some pieces of advice, which can help you escape small disappointing details.

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Let’s see what’s inside this template. In the header you’ll see the four blocks of animated menu with images that show the services of the company. Neat typography and contrasting color scheme with blue that is known as a color of reliability and security create a warm welcome to the clients. The content area is separated into 3 blocks that helps arrange all the information in easy-to-perceive manner. A set of social icons is integrated into the footer, where you can place the links to your social profiles for further communication with the customers. The responsive layout of the theme will help you get visits from the greater number of users. The template is compatible with Joomla versions 2.5.0-2.5.6, 2.5.7.

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Smartphone era actively flows, from time to time presenting interesting thing. The exclusive trend web developers ought to know and take into consideration is applications intended to shorten the news making understandable intelligence summaries. They have been called news bites.

Massive internet gave an access to the news in quite suitable way: they are free, easy-to-find, numerous. The smartphones gave an access to internet from anywhere. Connecting these two theses we would have a growing popularity of news apps. But why news bites? I suppose it’s just a natural evolution of news services for smartphones – and it have few concrete reasons. First of all, it’s dictated by the configuration of the smartphones: small screen is not so comfortable for reading large blocks of text.

The other convenience is you may quickly browse the news, finding exactly what is needed basing on clear summaries. Again – it’s especially useful for navigation based on the specific touch-screen interaction of smartphones.

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The most appropriate candidate for the role of news bites forerunner I assume to be Circa. This tool works well for news managing. Circa transforms articles into a list of their main ideas and facts, also quotes. Nevertheless, this news app doesn’t exploit fully automatic algorithm to slice texts into meaningful chunks, so it can be considered to be the previous generation. Indeed, programs stride ahead to communist future, where every process would be robotized.

Seems like the 8th version of Drupal should bring more excellent opportunities for web developers. The project includes six major initiatives, which actually define the character of incoming release. We can see that Drupal Team strongly follows the tendencies in modern technology process: for example, they are eager to grant the product with perfect mobile support, reacting on the smartphone boom. In general, Drupal 8 is claimed to become a remarkable web development framework of modern time.

According to the core initiatives (the first development cycle) status, scale shows 50%+ progress for every point, except the Layouts division. So we can expect the new version to be put into use soon. By the way, in case you want to speed up the process the Drupal Team is always glad to accept new developers and testers. Maybe you want to try? Below I will review every initiative in detail and the latest news regarding them.

What do you think of when you hear a phrase “the Arabic World”? Picturesque sand dunes, unbearable heat, camels, dazzlingly beautiful architecture, mysterious women wearing black abaya, exotic culture, historical Islamic values, honor and reputation… Actually an average person can’t boast strong knowledge of Arabic speaking countries. It seems as if the residents of this isolated secretive world zealously preserve their privacy and moral purity from the rest of the dissolute population. The statement is ungrounded, of course. Indeed, the Arab community has slight conception of privacy as due to their curious national character and large families living together they are absolutely devoid of solitude since childhood. Moreover, Arabs are very relaxed about time, they use to “go with the flow” and always dispose time for a good chat. They are really generous hosts and always serve much more food than their guests can actually eat.

Surely, our today’s interest towards the Arabic world is based on something more down-to-earth than their weird culture. Did you know that the area includes 25 countries and territories with aggregate population of nearly 400 million people? We can geographically outline the Arab world from the west coast of northern Africa (Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria etc) across to Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East.

- Quite impressive, isn’t it?

With present fast global development of e-Commerce, the Arab world looks like virgin soil attracting smart merchants. However, cultural gap often becomes an insuperable obstacle on the way to the desired market as the time-tested western web standards can be absolutely unacceptable and even insulting for Arab society.

For instance, representation of human form is considered a sin against Allah, forbidden by the Qur’an, so it’s better to replace it with rich ornaments, patterns and geometrical floral arabesque.

Here we can formulate the first design guideline for Arabic web:

1. Mind cultural peculiarities working on the visual presentation of your design.

The next substantial difference is that unlike English, Arabic scripts are read from right to left.

2. Usage of horizontal navigation bar on top of the web page is more suitable for the adapted version of your site.

Unfortunately, most of the Arabic speaking sites treat the language as the secondary one. From our viewpoint such situation is not absolutely fair with respect to native speakers the website is oriented on. Though, the majority of Arab website owners require English language support as well.

Continuing our talk about calligraphy, we can’t avoid the issue that the fonts applied for Arabic are unfortunately limited to the default Ariel, Verdana and Tahoma.

3. Make sure that the fonts you use are legible in Arabic and the user won’t have to download them to view the website content. Please also note that the script and language itself might need more space to convey the information, breaking the design harmony if this is not foreseen.

According to statistical data, the overwhelming majority of Arab internet users are young people between 20 and 40. Relying on this fact we can suggest that they share similar interests of the given global age group.

4. According to the above mentioned priority is given to social and MSN platforms as well as e-Commercial and gaming projects.

Even if you don’t plan to make your website accessible for Arabic users right now, the application of Unicode UTF-8 lets you insert necessary updates in future as this character encoding tool is flexible enough to allow certain additions from extended Latin alphabets.

Even when you have thoroughly studied all Arabic tastes and preferences, there is still no guarantee that the targeted audience would find your site among the diversity of web content.

5. Make use of SEO; verify your keywords not only on Google but on local search websites like Arabo, for example.

Notwithstanding the dependent status of Arabic women, they at times are much better educated than men.

6. Don’t you think that creating female interest oriented websites (i.e.: health, beauty, cooking tips, celebrity news, community forums) is not a bad idea when your goal is to conquer the Arabic web?

In a nutshell, if you provide exclusive, quality, timely, sharable content tailored specifically to the needs of Arabic speaking population, your website has all chances for success as the competition is objectively weak now-a-days.

7. If you want to boost the traffic of your Arabic speaking website, take care of its mobile app as total portable device craze has overflowed the countries of our particular interest together with the rest of civilized world.

We hope that the Arabic world seems a little bit friendlier now, all the more, that general familiar UI usability rules are completely applicable there.

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In the end of our entry, we would like to say a few words about colors, which are utterly important for web design.

- As you know, green is a sacred color of Islam.

- Many Muslims are dressed in white clothes on Friday prayers.

- Black is the color of chador and cloaks worn by the devout women and clergy respectively.

- Blue is a protective color and the most famous mosques are painted blue.

Here are several examples of Arabic websites; browsing them you will be able to make your own observations concerning specific features of their designs.

Creating groupon websites is proved to be successful in today’s market space. More numbers of companies are getting into the business of daily deals to raise money and reputation against their business names. With daily deal business exploding like anything in today’s market, launching on mayn’t be an issue, but finding the best clone script for your business may be! The benefits and features of groupon scripts have forced numerous companies to devise scripts and market them. So, when it comes to buying a good-looking script with incredible features, it may be cumbersome. If you are one such person looking for a high-quality script online, then this article could be valuable to you!

Checkout for the following features while you search online for a better script that works great for your business.

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The foremost thing that most web owners fail to realize when it comes to developing a website with groupon script is developing a business insight; it could really harm your business a lot if you don’t have any. Type of your business, target customers, type of deals, advertisements, marketing, etc. have to be well-planned before setting up a group buying website using groupon scripts. Upon developing such insight over your business, the next step would be creating a website using groupon.

Bootstrap, the so-popular framework built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat, is finally getting to its next release. Today we can check out the release of the preview site for Bootstrap 3.

We’ve had a basic summary of what to expect for Bootstrap 3 since December. In short, the creators shared that the framework will drop lots of it’s current functionalities, but will get lots of new even more cool.

Much more has changed, however, namely that Bootstrap 3 is now mobile first. According to the release note the launch has been rewritten “to be mobile friendly from the start. Instead of adding on optional mobile styles, they’re baked right into the core…Mobile first styles can be found throughout the entire library instead of in separate files.” Those who love gradient and bulgy elements probably were frightened by the flat design — don’t worry your favorite stuff is still there.

When browsing the web one can see hundreds of all possible variants of user data input. But among those most popular are still web forms. No matter how much lazy we are to fill them in, we still need them.

Web forms are everywhere…but people hate them, I’ve got a friend who works in the tech support of a hosting company, he says that every day their department receives from 10 to 15 emails about errors in web forms. According to tech support web forms are the nastiest things on any website. They break for no reason, and when they get fixed they break again.

If you’re designing web sites, it’s likely forms will be there, whether it is a simple login/feedback form or a supercharged web application. In this article we’are not going to point out ways of solving all possible misunderstandings with web forms, we’re going to speak about the design of login forms. Here we’ve united 5 web form design concepts for designers/developers that are of great importance when implemented.

1. Plain forms

That’s simple as a pie. No need to rack your head over the design, cause most people don’t even care about how your form looks like. In this case minimal style can “strengthen your hand”.

At present jQuery sliders are frequently used on all stylish contemporary websites. Such popularity is absolutely reasonable as the technique lets you cram different content into one limited area, thereby saving precious space on the web page and raising user’s interest. Implementation of jQuery slider on your website will immediately improve its appearance, interactivity, dynamics and user experience as a corollary. Among all slider types, the given one is highly appreciated by web developers for the simplicity of its usage and multiple transition effects available to choose from, i.e.: ken burns effect, squares, fade, parallax effect, basic linear, responsive slider, circular animation, swipe, animated caption and many others.

It’s rather difficult to define particular website categories, where jQuery sliders are applied the most often. Whenever you need to showcase images, articles, products or featured content and avoid messy layout – jQuery slider is able to cope with the issue in the beautiful elegant way.

If you are looking for impressive slider to fit your next project, this collection of 20 best recent jQuery scripts and tutorials will help you make up your mind. All of them won’t cost you a cent as they are free and ready to fascinate your visitors with excellent slideshows!